Dry spring on the cards for Alpine Shire

DE­SPITE a rel­a­tively wet Novem­ber (79.6mm in Myrtle­ford), the Alpine Shire has still fallen well short of its usual spring rain­fall av­er­ages.

Just 67mm fell in the months of Septem­ber and Oc­to­ber for Myrtle­ford this year down from 181 in 2017 and 294 in 2016.

In to­tal, it meant just 147.4mm fell in Myrtle­ford for the sea­son, al­most 80 short of the five year 226ml av­er­age.

Sim­i­larly, Bright ex­pe­ri­enced a very dry spring with just 167mm fall­ing com­pared to 264mm and 389mm the past two years.

Pore­punkah with 217.4mm saw the most rain across the past three months, but again re­mark­ably low sta­tis­tics for Septem­ber and Oc­to­ber meant the town fell well short of its five year av­er­age, 285.2mm.

Apart from a heavy down­fall way back on Septem­ber 7, Mel­bourne Cup Day was the wettest day of the sea­son.

And while race­go­ers were per­haps an­gered by the con­di­tions it was a timely boost for the re­gions greens.

Ac­cord­ing to the Myrtle­ford Weather Sta­tion, 21.2mm fell be­tween 9am and 3pm on Cup Day, equat­ing to over 14 per cent of the en­tire sea­sons rain.

Lo­cal live­stock trans­porter, Liam Har­ring­ton said the Cup Day down­pour was wel­comed by his clients.

“It was the per­fect time re­ally,” he said.

“Even just up the road to­wards Wan­garatta it was prob­a­bly a little bit too late be­cause the grass had al­ready started to go off, but here it worked out very well.”

The Alpine Shire of course had a very wet start to sum­mer in 2017 with flood­ing across the area due to over 130mm in two days on De­cem­ber 2 and 3.